Santa's House

Every Arctic country likes to claim Santa Claus for their own. Canadian children write domestic letters to Santa with the specially allocated Canadian zip code H0H 0H0, and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said in 2013 “Everyone knows that Santa Claus is Canadian.” Finnish children are taught that Santa lives in Lapland, Finland’s northernmost region. Ask Norwegians, and he lives in Drøbak, Norway. But to Danish children, there is no doubt he lives in Greenland—specifically, in this particular house near the town of Uummannaq.

While Denmark’s tradition of placing Santa in Greenland stretches back a long time, one particular Dane named Flemming Jensen is responsible for giving his home a precise spot close to Uummannaq. Before kicking off his career as a writer and director, Jensen spent two years as a schoolteacher in Greenland. The experience inspired him to produce the classic 1989 Danish children’s show, The Elf Gang In Greenland (Nissebanden I Grønland). The show is a “Christmas calendar,” a Nordic holiday staple consisting of a Christmas-themed series with exactly 24 episodes, one episode broadcast each day from December 1st to 24th.

Not every scene was actually filmed in Greenland, but the parts with Santa’s home were, at a small house built in traditional Greenlandic style. Decades later, the series’ lasting popularity and impact has left Uummannaq in the Danish collective imagination as Santa’s home when he’s away from the toy factory. A welcome sign even proclaims the town as “Santa’s vacation paradise.”

The house is still there, looking exactly just like the day it was built. While the inside was never shown in the show, it has since been fully furnished by locals and contains a bed, tables, chairs, cabinets, rugs, a fireplace, a stove, pots and pans, a sewing machine, framed photos, and various decorations. A guestbook allows you to record your visit. Hiding in the various drawers are letters left by children, some dating back more than 20 years. In many places, a fully decorated but vacant house that anyone can enter would have had its contents stolen long ago. But the house’s remote location, an hour’s hike away from a small village on an island in northern Greenland, has ensured its preservation.

Unfortunately, while the house may be a time capsule, the landscape is not. Several scenes in The Elf Gang In Greenland were filmed on the field of ice that covered the area. Back then, it was so thick and stable that you could drive a car on it, but by 2011, climate change had melted it all. Now only sea exists where a fjord once did. If Santa’s naughty list were publicly available, no doubt we’d see the world’s largest carbon emitters listed on it (although trying to punish them by giving them coal would perhaps have the opposite of the intended effect).